This past Tuesday was “School Budget Voting day” across Long Island. Long Island has one of the highest property tax levies in the US, so this day is always met with a ton of griping about how much school budgets go up each along with the corresponding tax increase. Words such as waste and abuse are thrown around like there is no tomorrow. You would have thought after Governor Asshole, I mean Cuomo, got a tax cap passed things would be different. Not a shot. Even with all the groping, only 4 budgets out of 124 failed and three of those only failed because they were trying to exceed the 2% cap which needs a 60% vote in favor to pass. This was the second best year for school budgets (97.6%) ever coming in behind only 2009 (98.4%).
Follow me below the fold as I talk about my school district’s budget vote fallout.
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My school district was one of the many ravaged by Superstorm Sandy. Our elementary school was closed for almost a year in order to get it back to where kids could once again have a safe environment for learning. While the school has opened back up, there is still plenty of work that needs to be done. Therefore it is not surprising that for the second year in a row, the school district needs to have a large increase in their budget. Correspondingly, they need to have a big revenue increase as well. This is where the trouble begins.
Our local paper, Newsday, publishes the budget numbers and tax levy increases and decreases every year ahead of the school budgets votes for all school districts across Long Island. This gives everyone a chance to compare their personal school budgets to everyone else's across Long Island. For the current and previous year, it is easy to see which districts were most affected by Sandy because most of the biggest increases came from those districts.
About a week prior to the school budget vote, I attended a meeting of one of the local chambers of commerce, (Our zip code with about 8,500 residents has two chambers of commerce due to politics. I'll delve more deeply in to that for a later diary) where there was a heated discussion about the budget numbers. Apparently Newsday had published just the percentage change in budgets for school districts across Long Island as opposed to both the budget and tax levy changes. I usually check the numbers the day before the vote and the chart Newsday printed when I checked showed percentages for both the change in budget and the change in tax levy so apparently they had either received updated numbers or got enough reader complaints to change their chart. In reality, it makes no sense for me to check as I always vote to approve the school budget.
The discussion centered around the fact that some people in our district thought the tax levy was increasing by close to 7% for the 2014-2015 school year because that was going to be the increase in the school budget prompting numerous complaints from residents. In fact the tax levy was going to increase less than 1.5% for the upcoming school year. Rather than just sending out the normal budget information the school district mails to all residents each year, all residents got a flyer mailed to them ahead of the proposed budget mailing explaining in full detail why the tax levy was different than the proposed budget increase. Not only did they show why the numbers were different, but the mailing also pointed out this year tax levy increase was going to be the lowest in 10 years, lower than the tax cap of 2% (the two priors years were 2.01% in 12-13 and 3.24% in 13-14) and the fact that our tax levy was coming in under both the CPI of 1.46% and the average across all Long Island school districts of 1.86%.
A lot of the complaints centered around $1.7 million being spent on capital improvements. With the exception of $210,000, all of the money spent was related in some way to Superstorm Sandy with a large emphasis on mitigation measures to hopefully protect the schools, especially the elementary school, from future water related disasters. These projects just became realized as the prior work got completed as well as students returning to the elementary school. The elementary school sits in a particularly vulnerable part of the district due to its slightly lower elevation and bad drainage systems in and around it. The largest non-Sandy related expense from that part of the budget is $150,000 for upgrading the lighting system in the middle school auditorium which is over 40 years old. This is therefore a lighting system that has been in place since before I was born. As a person who performed every concert and show when I was a student there, it is high time for an upgrade.
So the question then becomes, “From where did this $1.7 million come?” According the flyer sent home, the bulk of the money came from State and Federal aid (about $700K) due to the school for the past 3 years and insurance re-imbursements (about $440K). The rest of the money came from savings the school had from the past couple of years. These savings included about $250K from health insurance savings. How much of that is either directly or indirectly related to the ACA? I don’t know, but I am positive some of it is. Thus it was laid out for everyone to see none of the money being used for these projects was coming from the tax levy increase that would be paid by the residents of the district.
Of course living in a very Republican school district, at least on the state and local level, there were numerous people who apparently choose to believe their own version of reality rather than face the truth. Vitriol was spread across numerous Facebook pages dedicated to the district. What follows is a small sample of the galactically stupid comments posted. All comments have been cut and pasted to keep them authentic. (Some comments are pre-voting and some are post)
Pre-vote:
Quality education is deserved! but long island is heading to point where educational cost outweighs the benefit it provides
I want the children to have a great education but enough is enough . I believe we are asking for the highest increase of all or most of the schools around.
we have the best teachers, school board and admin., but the waste is unacceptable , class size can be bigger and we don't need that building for sure , contracts can be negotiated better , what really bothers me is always threat with taking things away if things don't pass , I never see cutting back (Apparently this person didn’t read the flyer that showed over $500K in expenditure reductions including from salaries and retirement benefits)
Post vote:
yay I own an empty lot... you will be paying more!!! woo hoo [name of town]!! you guys just keep going!!!
Lockstep shuffle
i know.... but many of our neighbors don't care.. and that makes having to leave a little easier.... imagine a village that doesn't care about it's people.... i don't want to live here anymore....
Such lovely people to live amongst, huh?
BTW, the school budget passed 313-187. I guess a super-majority of people believe educating our children is one of the most important things we can do as a community.
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May 25, 2014
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From Yasuragi:
Such a moving comment from shanikka in Denise Oliver Velez's diary this morning.
From liberaldad2:
Onomastic has written an anecdote (in a response to a comment on her own diary) that illustrates the fundamentally different way that men and women see the world. I wish that all women and (especially) men would have a chance to read this and understand how women feel on a daily basis.
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